Mosaic Emerging Scholar Essay Prize for Graduate Students

Mosaic Emerging Scholar Essay Prize

Call for Papers

Recognizing that graduate students and new scholars face increasing precarity, Mosaic created the Emerging Scholar Essay Prize in honour of Dr. Dawne McCance, the journal’s editor from 1999 to 2017. This juried competition is open to students currently enrolled in a graduate program in the arts or humanities and new scholars who graduated with a PhD in these same disciplines within the last three years (on the date of submission). Eligible submissions will be evaluated by members of Mosaic’s Editorial Board. Submissions must be received by October 22, 2018. The winner will receive:

· A cash prize of $500
· Publication in a special issue of Mosaic
· A two-year print subscription to Mosaic

Mosaic invites innovative and interdisciplinary submissions on the theme of Textual Politics. Textual Politics exist in a number of contested forms. Often, if treated as self-reflexive in nature, they turn on the complex ways authors inhabit their texts as much as the ways in which they might shift or unsettle such a position in order to out-negotiate the larger obstacles any position-taking presumes. More complexly, Textual Politics place special pressure on position-taking as such. Here, psychoanalytic theory has led the way, enabling one to act otherwise, enabling one to let go of thetic mastery in favour of other, non-oppositional ways of thinking, writing, and living. Positions—as critics as diverse as Toril Moi, Jacques Derrida, Jay Lemke, and Carl Plasa suggest—instance a range of unexamined power relations that bleed into textual hierarchies and logocentric binaries like man/woman, white/black, mind/body, and human/animal. Conversely, working upstream from content and the identity this presumes, Textual Politics have the potential to free up the object from these ontologically fraught conditions.

Topics might broach feminist, ethnic, and race studies; how Textual Politics complicate issues of civility; analysis centering on ethics as a discursive mode; the politics of citationality; textual literacy; animal studies; embodiment; written, oral, and/or filmic hierarchies; eco-politics; climate change and climate refugees; and the #MeToo or other social media movements.

Essays must represent innovative thought, either in the form of extending or challenging current critical positions. Focus can be on literary works, cultural texts, or issues related to any historical period, national culture, ethnic background, genre, or media. Mosaic seeks essays that are theory-oriented, that conjoin theory with practical application, or that examine specific texts. Submissions should employ any interdisciplinary critical approach or methodology. Essays must be thoroughly researched and include reference to recent scholarship. Essays may be submitted in English or French and may include images.

All submissions must conform to Mosaic’s submission guidelines:
· Essays must be between 7,000 and 7,500 words in length (including a 50-word abstract, endnotes, and list of works cited).
· Endnotes (maximum 500 words total) should be used strictly to clarify problematic documentation procedures. Discursive notes should be kept to an absolute minimum.
· Essays may originate in but cannot be an exact or unmodified excerpt from a thesis or dissertation.
· Essays may not be previously published and cannot be under consideration for publication with any other journal or medium.
· Graduate students currently enrolled at the University of Manitoba are not eligible.

Essays that do not conform to the journal’s submission guidelines will be rejected.

Please address inquiries by email to:

Dr. Shep Steiner, Editor
Mosaic, an interdisciplinary critical journal
University of Manitoba
208 Tier Building
Winnipeg MB R3T 2N2 Canada
Email: mosasub@umanitoba.ca
Submit online: www.umanitoba.ca/mosaic/submit